The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
A communications device typically includes multiple interfaces for communication with other devices. PortChannel is a technology that aggregates multiple interfaces into a single logical interface, and thus provides, inter alia, aggregate bandwidth and load balancing capabilities, and appears to higher-level protocols as a single logical interface. It is important that each side of a link that is part of a PortChannel is configured to act accordingly.